In an operating system, such as WINDOWS XP operating system, taskbar icons may be grouped together in the taskbar. This grouping of taskbar icons is done by application. For example, when multiple word processing application documents (such as MICROSOFT Word documents) are opened on a computer, in the user display the taskbar icons for these documents are grouped together in the taskbar in a common taskbar icon, having the number of taskbar icons (representing the number of open MICROSOFT Word documents) listed in the common taskbar icon. Left clicking on the word processing application's common taskbar icon shows the word processing application documents currently open in a popup view. Further, clicking on one of the open document's taskbar icon in the popup view causes that document to be brought to the foreground in the display.
In MICROSOFT WINDOWS 7 operating system, the taskbar icon grouping features were changed slightly to use an application ID property, which allows for disparate processes to be grouped under a common taskbar icon or multiple views from one process to be grouped separately under multiple taskbar icons. WINDOWS XP, MICROSOFT and WINDOWS are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries.